Category Archives: News & Opinion

Yes, I’ll admit it: I’m a slight celebrity gossip junkie. My guilty pleasure is reading People.com and seeing what’s going on in the celebrity world. However, that was until I discovered PeoplePets.com. Now, I’m a pet gossip junkie, if that’s even possible.

One of the photo slides I found today on PeoplePets.com was called “Doggie Duggars” and it featured the world’s biggest litters of puppies. It’s amazing how many puppies can actually come from one litter and I thought I would share with you some of the biggest puppy litters from the article.

While I am sharing these pictures and this article, and while looking at baby puppies (or anything baby) is so adorable, I am still in support for always spaying and neutering your pets.

Besides the overpopulation of dogs and cats – the fact that many are homeless, roaming the streets, and thousands are being killed because there are not enough homes for the animal’s rising population – there are many other benefits to spaying and neutering your pets.

Here are some of them:

1) 50% of dogs and 90% of cats will die if they get breast cancer (yes, even animals can get breast cancer too). Spaying helps prevent breast cancer and uterine infections, which will help your female pet live a longer and healthier life.

2) Neutering helps your male pet too by helping to prevent testicular cancer. Plus, a neutered male dog will not run away in search of a mate, he will not spray in the house, and he will overall be better behaved.

3) For the pet owners, spaying and neutering your pet is also very cost-effective. The price of getting your pet fixed is a lot less than the price you would be paying if your pet were to have a litter. Imagine how much money and work would be needed if your pet had a litter as big as the ones above!

These are just 3 of the many reasons why you should spay and neuter your pet. Check out the full 10 reasons to spay and neuter your pet on the ASPCA website here.

Remember, there are animals dying out there because they can not find homes. Prevent the overpopulation, which eventually leads to millions of dogs and cats dying every year, by spaying and neutering your pet. Plus, your pet will thank you by leading a longer and healthier life!

Well apparently, even adults get angry when there’s no candy during Halloween.

According to the Huffington Post Chicago, Ledell Peoples, a Chicago man, killed his friend Maria Adams after a bag of candy went missing and he suspected that she took it. Maria Adams was stabbed multiple times with “several steak knives” last Monday night, on Halloween. Adams eventually died at Stroger Hospital on Saturday night. After the autopsy of Adams is completed, first-degree murder will most likely be filed against Ledell Peoples.

People, especially this Peoples (the guy’s last name), disgust me. How could a missing bag of candy ignite such an anger inside him that he must stab his friend? What is the world coming to if something as little as this causes murder?

I continue to keep updated with the news even though 50% of the articles are about murder trials or people being murdered. It frustrates me – however, not enough for me stab someone – to see such sad articles. And it disappoints me that people are so hateful, violent, and just plain stupid.

This guy should definitely be charged with first-degree murder. Someone like this, someone who murders over missing candy, should not be allowed to roam the streets.

According to the Global Post, Shirley, an orangutan in Malaysia, must be forced to quit smoking after she has been showing some abnormal behaviors such as mood swings, drowsiness and becoming agitated when she doesn’t have a cigarette. But how did she start smoking in the first place?

Well, apparently, visitors to the zoo would throw lit cigarettes into her enclosure, and Shirley, mimicking her “wonderful” human “role models”, would smoke the cigarettes thrown in for her.

Luckily though, Nature Alert, a British activist group, complained, authorities realized that the zoo which Shirley was in was not a good environment. Shirley, as well as a tiger and a baby elephant, were all removed from the zoo, and should be sent to a wildlife center on Borneo island.

It just outrages me that people are so gosh darn stupid and insensitive as to throw a cigarette into an animal’s enclosure. What the hell were they thinking? What if Shirley had eaten the cigarettes that were thrown in? What if a fire had started in the enclosure during a dry season or something? It’s bad enough that she smoked them, and it also says in the article that she’s more than 20 years old, so now, depending on how long she has been smoking, it didn’t say, she could develop cancer and other health problems.

Grrr … the human population just angers me. We all need to grow-up, and not think a “smoking monkey” is funny or cool because it’s not! It’s an outrage! It’s not natural for animals to be smoking, and it’s not right for humans to be exposing them to man-made death traps.

According to the Daily Mail, award-winning photographer, David Slater, whom was visiting a national park in Indonesia, left his camera unattended for a while. Curious by her reflection in the lens, a female black macaque, grabbed the camera and “smiled” for a picture.

Apparently, by the time David Slater retrieved his camera, the macaque ‘must have taken hundreds of pictures’, though not all were in focus. Guess they still need a bit more practice!

I loved reading this news article not just for the cute pictures, but also because it really does show you how intelligent animals truly are. They are eternal children – we all know a few humans that are the same way! – and whomever says that animals don’t have feelings, souls or emotions is plain wrong.

Just by looking at the “self-portraits” by the macaque, and staring into her eyes, you can see that she is curious yet intelligent, excited yet cautious, and nothing short of a 3 year old human child!

According to BBC News, only two, out of four, Liger cubs – offspring of a male lion and a female tiger – survived when they were born at the Xixiakou Wildlife Zoo in China.

When their tiger mother stopped nursing them, due to reasons unknown by the zoo staff, a dog, whom recently had her own puppies, became the new step-mother of these liger cubs.

Ligers are extremely rare and are known to only be born in captivity. While tigers and lions are from different species, they are still able to breed together, and ligers are the biggest known cat, even growing larger than both their different species parents.

It’s strange how different species are able to breed with one another and actually produce offspring. I wonder if, when/if aliens are found, humans could mate with them and produce a “huien” baby?! Sick thought, I know.

Anyway, I have always been interested in hearing stories about one species that ends up taking care and nursing another species when it is left orphaned. I know there are many stories about dogs taking in other specie babies such as pigs, kittens, and now ligers, however there are even other species – ones that no one would even think would do that – taking care of orphaned babies.

One of my favorite books, which gives examples of inner-species parent/child relationships, is Unlikely Friendships by Jennifer Holland. Hearing the stories which fill that book, and the story above, brings my heart joy as I think how much alike humans and animals are.

The one day a year when children dress up as the monsters they think are under their beds,

when it’s socially acceptable to be a slut

and when the warning, “never take candy from a stranger” becomes irrelevant.

Personally, I have never really enjoyed Halloween or even considered it a holiday – I mean you don’t even get off of school or work for it, even though there is essential planning and preparation needed!

Yes, I trick-or-treated as a kid and yes, Halloween parties as a teenager were fun to attend, however once I became too old to go door to door to fill my pillow case with candy that was never eaten, and once the parties became bombarded with “playboy bunnies” and “sexy nuns”, Halloween became the least of my priorities.

However, as Halloween 2011 nears, blog posts, news articles and Facebook statuses fill with people’s opinions and planning of the upcoming “Day of the Dead”, so I have decided to jump on the bandwagon and write this Halloween post.

First off, I love Fall/Autumn (however you like to call the falling-of-the-leaves season). I love bonfires, I love visiting cider mills and I love carving pumpkins. All these things , along with the beautiful tree color changes and the Fall smell that encompasses the air, reminds me of childhood, the change of the season and that Christmas is even closer.

Yet, none of the things mentioned above remind me of Halloween. I literally almost forgot about Halloween until it became talked, tweeted and messaged about. And then I stumbled upon this Huffington Post article:

It is targeted for young girls and is supposed to be a World War II Evacuee costume. However, it is British, not American, and supposedly, “the UK has several national commemoration days worked into the elementary school curriculum as a creative way to teach kids British history. One of these is the unfortunately named Evacuee Day.”

I don’t know how I feel about this. I understand that this costume is meant to be “educational”, however, is this, while unintentionally, poking fun or even exploiting the horrors that World War II was?

What is your opinion of all of this? Is Halloween turning into a day when all morals, and what would otherwise be considered “scandalous” behavior, is thrown out the window? Or is it OK, one day a year, for teenagers to flaunt their bodies and for little girls to dress up as WWII evacuees?

Do you see that picture above?! Among those animals you see lying, dead, on the ground are bears, monkeys, lions and rare Bengal tigers.

What happened here to cause such a horrible scene?

Terry Thompson, the owner of a wildlife preserve in Zanesville, Ohio, had released his brood of exotic animals and then shot himself. Officers were forced to gun down the animals as “these animals were on the move and were showing aggressive behavior,” said Muskingum County Sheriff Matt Lutz. After everything was over, 49 animals – 18 rare Bengal tigers, 17 lions, 6 black bears, 2 grizzly bears, 3 mountain lions, 2 wolves and 1 baboon – were slaughtered. According to ABC News, Jack Hanna, wildlife expert, ‘said it was especially heartbreaking to see so many Bengal tigers killed when they are on the verge of extinction’.

While this tragedy is unbelievable, and a macaque monkey is still on the loose, it was a lucky day for 6 of the animals – 1 grizzly bear, 3 leopards and 2 monkeys – as Terry Thompson never released them from their cage and they were still found there. They are being taken to the Columbus Zoo.

My mother brought this incident to my attention and it absolutely pissed me off. First, it upset me on how little laws Ohio has pertaining to keeping wild and exotic animals as pets. Second, and most importantly, while the officers and everyone involved said there was no other way than to kill these animals, there really had to be another option.

The photo above isn’t even the worse. This is the worst:

How, after everything that these animals had been through – being killed and I guess their owner Terry Thompson abused them – could the officers just throw their bodies on top of one another like that. Also, if you watch the video, you see a few of the carcasses being dragged behind a tractor and even though they are going to be “buried”, these animals are special beings and deserve to be treated with more respect.

Another thing that upset me to high heavens was the fact that, if you read the article it explains how a vet tried to tranquilize one tiger and, according to the article, the tiger ‘”just went crazy” and started to run, so officers were forced to shoot it with lethal ammunition’. Why, after one try, did they give up and just kill it? Maybe the tranquilizer wasn’t strong enough – a tiger is a big animal – so why didn’t they get stronger tranquilizers?. Why didn’t they try the amount of tranquilizers they had on the smaller animals such as the wolves and monkeys, instead of killing them right away?

The whole thing seems absolutely surreal to me and the fact that there was no other option than to kill these animals is unbelievable.

While the 49 animals, including already endangered species, were killed, there is something we can do to prevent this “situation” from happening in the future. Whether you’re an Ohio resident or not, visit this site and demand that action be taken to prevent the ownership and sales of exotic animals.

Juan Jose Padilla, a Spanish bullfighter, was gored by a 1,120 pound bull named Marques, during a bullfight in Zaragoza, Spain. Marques’ left horn pierced Padilla’s lower jaw and went straight through, coming out beside his eyeball. The thirty-nine year old bullfighter ended up with eye, bone, muscle and skin damage and even though he underwent a five-hour surgery, surgeons were not able to repair a severed facial nerve. The Miguel Servet Hospital even said that Padilla will likely suffer facial paralysis and be blind in the eye that was pierced.

While this incident, of a bullfighter being pierced by a bull, has happened before, it still shakes people up and gets them wondering if the tradition of bullfighting should be continued.

Not only is bullfighting a cruel and inhumane sport against the bull itself – with the bull being pierced numerous times with spears until its eventual and painful death – but it is also extremely risky and can turn out harmful and even fatal for the matadors, the bullfighters.

Having lived in Spain for 3 years, I have had many conversations with my Spanish friends about their feelings towards bullfighting. I have found that the older generation still finds it as a tradition and a “form of art”. However, with the younger generation, they feel that bullfighting gives Spain a “bad name” and that it is cruel. The younger generation has no problem getting rid of bullfighting all together while some of the older generation still think that it should be kept simply as a “tradition”.

My Spanish boyfriend and I personally do not like bullfighting. We both think that it is a cruel and horrible sport and source of entertainment. We were so thrilled and happy to find out that Catalonia – which is comprised of the four provinces Barcelona, Girona, Lleida and Tarragona – officially banned bullfighting and the last ever bullfight occurred on September 25th, 2011.

Hopefully, this ban on bullfighting reaches other cities and eventually is adopted by all of Spain. I have never been to a bullfight and never will go to one but highlights of bullfights are often recapped on the Spanish sports news. It makes me so mad to watch and I secretly wish that the men which are doing the fighting are injured instead of the bull.

Bullfighting does need to be stopped. 180,000 people had to sign the petition that banned bullfighting in Catalonia so another petition needs to be drawn up and signed for the ban of bullfighting in Madrid and all over the rest of Spain!

The first I heard of Lennox was from Rumpydog. This poor 6-year-old dog’s story and mistreatment literally brought me to tears. The pain his family has gone through and the pain Lennox, himself, has gone through is literally heartbreaking.

Even though this American-Bull-Dog-Labrador mix’s family had him “neutered, licensed, insured and DNA registered”, the Belfast, Northern Ireland City Council now feels the need to classify Lennox as a “Pit Bull”.

While there doesn’t seem any hope left for poor Lennox, you can still try and help. Visit SaveLennox.co.uk and find out how you can make your voice heard and maybe put a stop to future dogs being killed because of their looks.

This is true discrimination and needs to be stopped.

Speak out against Belfast, Northern Ireland and show your support in favor of Lennox and his family.

Remember, Lennox can feel the hate, pain and mistreatment that has been inflicted on him. He is a living being with a beating heart and deserves the right to live.